Accounting runs in my family, and I still remember my early exposure to the craft from seeing my father come home after a long day at his tax practice. Fast forward ahead to the mid-1990s, and I was an undergraduate working towards my bachelor’s in business administration at Seoul’s Hong-ik University (Hongdae). Like most young business majors, I did not know where my studies would take me; management & strategy, sales & marketing, accounting & finance, operations or human resources?
This uncertainty all changed when my passion for accounting was ignited and made clear during my time as an exchange student in North Carolina, USA.
I had a chance to study at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC) from 1996 to 1997, and during my first semester, I enrolled in a class that would become the pivotal point that sparked my future career – ACCT 3136, Managerial Cost Accounting.
This course shattered all my preconceived notions about accounting being dull, boring, or bland. Instead, it took me beyond the spreadsheets, and into the world of a factory production line. Where I was intrigued by the whole process of seeing how raw materials are purchased, molded into a work-in-process, and later finalized as finished products for the marketplace.
The power of numbers truly spoke to me, and I began to understand how this power can transform and empower industries. I was hooked and became a voracious consumer of accounting principles with an insatiable desire for all information accounting. Over the next 19 years my brain became comfortable with the painstaking details of tax codes, and changing rules and regulations. My appetite for this information has become a life-long passion to master accounting as both an art and science.